Politico: Emmanuel Macron, anti-European

Among other strikes, they cite the following French-led moves as going against the spirit of the single market: an overhaul of posted worker rules; France’s temporary nationalization of shipyards; its embrace of geographic indicators for dairy products; and plans to allow limited price fixing for agricultural products. [...]

And while Macron has reaped praise for his ambitious approach to Europe — calling for a shared European “strategic culture” — when it comes to trade and the single market, time after time, the French President has taken measures his critics describe as erecting barriers and favoring French interests. [...]

Selimovic, the Swedish liberal, said he understood Macron’s intentions, and could see that the approach is bearing results. But he worried that by the time the French president is finished, there would be little left of the single market as it existed in the early 2000s.

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Politico: In the line of fire: Poland’s digital ambitions

Even as Warsaw’s top brass has largely alienated the highest ranks of the European Commission, Council and Parliament, Poland’s digital policymakers have worked as part of a group of about a dozen “like-minded” liberal countries — including Sweden, Denmark, the U.K. and Estonia — leading the charge on digital issues.

With Britain preoccupied with its imminent departure from the bloc, Poland — known for its army of highly skilled coders and technical experts — has emerged as the group’s largest member country and a potential leader on major digital issues. [...]

Despite recent strides, Poland still has a long way to go before becoming a European leader on tech. The country ranks 23 out of 28 on the EU’s digital economy and society index, lagging significantly on everything from the use of social media by enterprises (only 9 percent) to subscriptions to fast broadband across the country.

Streżyńska’s lack of partisanship — she refused to join a political group or align herself with Jarosław Kaczyński’s ruling Law and Justice party — was a welcome signal to consumers, stakeholders and policymakers in Brussels, but increasingly put her at odds with her bosses. [...]

Replacing Streżyńska would also be a blow because it would likely also mean getting rid of the digital ministry’s secretary of state Krzysztof Szubert, who deals closely with EU affairs and whom many in Brussels see as a positive influence on the bloc’s digital agenda. He is credited in the EU capital with leading important lobbying efforts — including putting digital policy on the agenda at European Council summits this year, and pressuring the Commission to relax rules on the free movement of data across EU borders. [...]

It’s true that the upper echelons of the Polish government, including Prime Minister Beata Szydło, seem to have bought into Poland’s digital sales pitch. Szydło signed a letter including 17 EU heads of state asking to make digital a priority on the political level. She also claimed responsibility for helping to bring about this year’s Digital Summit in Tallinn, one of the first meetings where EU heads of state dedicated their time to discussing digital.

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Politico: The birth of a Polish president

Others in the party vowed to press on over Duda’s opposition and try to override the vetoes, arguing that the proposed legislation had been part of his electoral program. This act of presidential defiance takes Duda probably to the point of no return in the PiS fold, introducing an unexpected element in Polish politics that will play out between now and the next presidential election in three years. [...]

The assault on Duda culminated in a televised primetime statement by Prime Minister Beata Szydło. “The president slowed us down but we won’t surrender and will realize our program,” she said. [...]

PiS’ attitude toward the rule of law might have best been expressed in the words of the veteran anti-communist Kornel Morawiecki, who in an address to parliament said: “The law is an important thing, but the law is not a sanctity. Above the law is the good of the nation.” To a lengthy standing ovation from PiS deputies, he said: “If the law interferes in this good, we cannot consider it as something which cannot be breached and changed.” [...]

This may be an indication that Duda’s actions were motivated by his rivalry with Ziobro. The president was not consulted or informed before the law targeting the Supreme Court was introduced in parliament, and had later called for changes to the law regarding the National Judiciary Council.

His behavior also betrayed anger that the legislation gave the justice minister the sole authority to decide which Supreme Court judges would be allowed to stay. PiS proposed a compromise amendment, giving him the power to nominate judges that had been previously selected for him by Ziobro. But evidently, it was not enough.

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Politico: Protests in Warsaw as government moves on courts

PiS remains Poland’s most popular party, relying on support from older, conservative and rural voters. A new poll by the Kantar organization this week had PiS with 38 percent support, followed by Civic Platform (Klich’s party) with 19 percent. Another recent poll showed 52.6 percent of Poles oppose the government of Prime Minister Beata Szydło, with 38 percent in favor. [...]

Brussels has sounded alarmed by what’s happening in Warsaw. The European Commission may launch an infringement procedure against Poland next week for breaking EU law, and could trigger Article 7 proceedings — a move that could end with Poland losing its voting rights as an EU member.

Such an outcome is unlikely because Poland’s ideological ally, Hungary, has promised to block any such action. “We stand by Poland and we call on the European Commission not to overstep its authority,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in a statement Thursday. [...]

The government has brushed off both protesters and Brussels, arguing its reforms are needed to cleanse a dysfunctional justice system. “We won’t give in to pressure,” Szydło told parliament after it adopted the Supreme Court legislation. “We won’t be scared off by Polish and foreign defenders of elite interests.”

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openDemocracy: The real reason Trump went to Poland

Trump's visit was meant to carry symbolic weight. Daniel Tilles, editor of the Notes from Poland social media news group, commented prior to the visit that Trump and PiS "share a distain for the conventional rules and practices of democracy" and will try to "capitalize on their agreement on major issues like migration, defense and a distrust of institutions such as the media and the judiciary". [...]

For his part, Trump declared America's love for Poland, credited Polish-Americans for voting for him, and heaped praise on the PiS establishment. His speech left PiS delirious. Prime Minister Beata Szydło immediately stated that the speech demonstrated that now "Poland was an important country" and even a "guarantor of world peace".

There were few genuinely critical voices in the press, but only Greenpeace, the Razem (Together) party and other leftist groups staged small protests. Poland is a middle-sized country in Europe, but too often its elites suffer from the inferiority complex of a small country. The parliamentary opposition, still struggling to mount a credible electoral challenge to PiS, dared not criticise Trump's speech seeing it as a 'success for Poland'. PiS could not have wished for a better propaganda coup. [...]

Even before Trump's arrival, reports emerged that a controversial historian, Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, from the Institute of World Politics (which employs another infamous Trump advisor, Sebastian Gorka), had a hand in writing the speech. According to Rafał Pankowski, a member of the anti-racist Never Again Association, this "raised eyebrows because of Chodakiewicz’s long record of far-right links. He is mostly known as a denier of Polish responsibility for acts of antisemitism".

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Political Critique: Poland’s Immoral Refugee Policy

On June 13, the European Commission filed a lawsuit against Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, accusing them of violating European Union law by refusing to admit refugees. The next day, Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło gave a speech at the site of the Auschwitz death camp to mark the 77th anniversary of the first deportation of Polish prisoners there. “In today’s turbulent times,” she said, Auschwitz is a reminder of “how important it is for a country to do everything possible to protect the safety and the lives of its citizens.”

One wonders what Szydło was talking about, and from whom she wants to protect Poles. Her remarks seemed to compare today’s Poles to the Holocaust’s Jewish victims, and today’s refugees to the Nazis. In response, European Council President Donald Tusk, who previously held Szydło’s current post, lamented that, “A Polish prime minister should never utter such words in such a place.” [...]

In the United States, the decision to turn away ships bearing Jewish refugees just before the start of World War II has become a source of national shame. Just when Jews were being murdered in Europe, the US experienced an unprecedented wave of anti-Semitism. Over the course of the war, the US admitted just 21,000 Jewish refugees – a mere 10% of the maximum number allowed by law. Worse still, many Americans favored a complete ban on all refugees; and, according to opinion polls from 1938-1945, 35-40% of Americans would have supported legislation directed against Jews in particular.

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Politico: Why Warsaw loves to hate Brussels

This personal attack was unprecedented, but it came only days after an eye-catching speech in the Polish parliament by Prime Minister Beata Szydło. Dredging up the fight over the relocation of refugees across the EU from 2015, she called out “the Brussels political elites … blinded by political correctness” and promised Poland won’t be “blackmailed” by the EU. To a standing ovation from the Law and Justice party caucus, she added, “We will not participate in the madness of the Brussels elites. We want to help people and not the political elites.” [...]

From Warsaw’s point of view, there seems to be little downside to continuing to pick this fight. At least the Law and Justice party appears to think so. The spitballs have kept coming even after Warsaw’s debacle at the EU summit in March, when it lost a fight over the reelection of Donald Tusk to a second term atop the European Council. No one, not even illiberal Hungary, backed Poland’s opposition to native son and PiS rival Tusk. The episode seemed to only revive Tusk’s political fortunes and give his until then demoralized Civic Platform a boost in the polls. “Today there is a clear crisis of principles in Europe,” Szydło said after the Tusk outcome in Brussels, which Waszczykowski attributed to “Berlin’s diktat.” [...]

As Czarnecki suggests, PiS is aware of the EU money on the line and the generally deep support among Poles for the EU, currently near record numbers — at 78 percent according to a March poll by IBRiS or 88 percent in an April CBOS poll, one percentage point below the recorded high in 2014. [...]

By a pragmatic reading of all this, PiS will keep up the harsh rhetoric in public — and, with a view to keeping the EU money coming and in light of the strong popular support for Europe (and the recent trend away from populist parties on the Continent), be open to accommodation and dialogue with Brussels in private. Some EU diplomats say they’re picking up signs of that.

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Politico: Merkel gets support (of sorts) from Poland

Merkel stressed the importance of  pluralistic societies and an independent judiciary and media. Poland’s government is accused of undermining the judiciary and is being investigated by the Commission and by the Venice Commission, a body of the Council of Europe. “I was pleased to hear that Poland will answer the European Commission and Venice Commission’s questions,” she said.

Before continuing talks with Szydło over dinner, Merkel met with Kaczyński at the elegant Hotel Bristol near Warsaw’s Old Town, rather than PiS’s dowdier headquarters. [...]

At an EU summit in Malta last week, the German chancellor spoke of a “Europe with different speeds.” Such words have traditionally sounded alarm bells in Poland, which is not a member of the eurozone. The day after the Brexit referendum, Kaczyński warned of a “Carolingian” EU centered around the founding member countries that would leave Poland marginalized. [...]

“She wanted to make sure that Kaczyński’s controversial statements about the need for a deep EU treaty reform, re-nationalization of EU powers and a counterweight to Germany would not lead to an obstructionist policy against her primary goal of preserving the EU in the context of Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency,” he said.

That may be an uphill task – but Kaczyński has acknowledged that Merkel is Poland’s best bet in Berlin. In an interview with Bild last summer he endorsed her for a fourth term as chancellor.

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The Huffington Post: How Hungary and Poland have silenced women and stifled human rights

The popular view voiced by the Polish opposition - that the governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) wants to bring back the Middle Ages - is insufficient. It relies on the “backlash” narrative of women’s emancipation, which sees nations making linear progress towards equality, interrupted by setbacks that can be overcome by joint action. [...]

The emergent regimes of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Beata Szydło in Poland do not represent a revival of authoritarianism, but a new form of governance. This new system stems from the failures of globalisation and neoliberalism, which created states that are weak for the strong, and strong for the weak.

To describe the modus operandi of these new regimes, we have coined a new term: the “polypore” state.

A polypore is a parasitic fungus that feeds on rotting trees, contributing to their decay.

In the same way, the governments of Poland and Hungary feed on the vital resources of their liberal predecessors, and produce a fully dependent state structure in return.

This style of government involves appropriating the institutions, mechanisms and funding channels of the European liberal democratic project. [...]

Just as the polypore fungus usually attacks already damaged trees, illiberal regimes rise to power in the context of democratic standards weakened by the financial, security and migration crises.

In Central Europe, post-1989 regime transformation gave preference to economic reform measures over civic and social ones. Liberal norms and practices have never been fully embedded in these societies. This creates a paradoxical situation where illiberal forces have flourished amid an unfinished liberal revolution.

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VICE: Photos from the Latest Protest in Poland Against the Crackdown on Women's Rights

On Saturday, October 1, thousands of protesters dressed in black came together in front of the Polish parliament. For the second week in a row, they were collectively mourning the demise of women's rights in Poland and protesting the proposed near-total ban on abortion in the country. Among the protesters were women and men of all ages, representatives of political parties from the far left to the political center, and quite a few feminist organizations.

A little over a week ago, the initiative behind the protest—the pro-choice coalition Save Women—proposed a draft bill that would give women in Poland the right to abort a pregnancy that hasn't surpassed 12 weeks. But on Friday, September 23, MPs voted against it. Instead, they voted in favor of further banning and criminalizing abortion—with this other proposed bill, women who terminate their pregnancy can face up to five years in prison. Polish prime minister Beata Szydło has said in an interview that the street isn't the appropriate place to discuss abortion—which led Save Women to ask during Saturday's protest: "So, what is the appropriate place to discuss it, if you threw out our draft bill in parliament?"

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Politico: Poles to the right of Jarosław Kaczyński

PiS has turned a blind eye to the activities of the likes of the All-Polish Youth and the National Radical Camp (ONR) — which were banned for decades before the fall of communism in 1989 — to the dismay of mainstream parties like the centrist opposition Civic Platform, which this week asked Poland’s prosecutor general to outlaw the ONR for propagating fascism. [...]

Green ONR flags rippled in the background as PiS-affiliated President Andrzej Duda made his way to a Gdańsk church for the reburial mass. Nationalists booed and harassed a handful of activists from the Committee for the Defense of Democracy (KOD), a centrist grouping that has staged anti-government street protests in recent months.

Lech Wałęsa, the historic leader of the Solidarity labor union and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was greeted with cries of “traitor” and “death to the country’s enemies.” [...]

In response, Elżbieta Witek, chief of staff to Prime Minister Beata Szydło, told reporters, “Above all, I value those who are patriots.”

In last October’s parliamentary election, PiS had the support of a quarter of voters aged 18-29, much better than its past performance with that age bracket. Not all of those voters were nationalists or right-wingers, but those groupings have become part of PiS’s support base. [...]

In practical terms, too, the PiS government has made it easier for the ultra-nationalists to operate. In a review of police training materials conducted by the interior ministry in June, the ONR’s symbol — a hand gripping a sword — was removed from a guide to hate crimes.

When the ONR announced its intention to patrol the streets of the city of Łódź to “protect the Polish people against migrants,” regional governor Zbigniew Rau from the PiS defended them, saying, “If young people want to do something for the common good and they are concerned that [public] safety could be in danger, then it is the kind of capital on which we can build.”

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